Extension Natural Resources Wildlife Team

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Backpacking Ospreys

Researchers are strapping small solar-powered satellite transmitter onto the back of Ospreys to monitor the bird's location, within a few hundred yards, for the next two to three years.

Peering over the shoulders of migrating Ospreys

On a clear morning in early September 2008, a three-month-old female Osprey
named Penelope pushed off from Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, and flew,
alone, 2,700 miles to French Guiana in 13 days.

She touched down in coastal Maryland and North Carolina for three days, lazed
along the Bahamas for four, then blew through the Dominican Republic in 29
hours. At dusk she launched out over the Caribbean, flying all night and the
next day to a tiny island off the coast of Venezuela. A week later she was
exploring rainforest rivers in French Guiana, her home for the next 18 months.